Wunderland(12)

Released from the stewardess’s spell, Sophie resumed chanting: “Up-up-up-up-up!” She began to twist and buck.

“Wait, wait,” hushed Ava. “A minute more. We are still looking for Oma. If she doesn’t come I’ll lift…” But before she’d finished the sentence there, in fact, was Ilse, wearing a plaid dress and matching cardigan and looking as though she’d just strolled off the Bremen underground.

“Mama!” Ava called.

As Ilse snapped her braid-wrapped head back toward them, Ava grasped Sophie’s soft wrist to make her wave. The baby, whose strength was truly astonishing, arm-wrestled the gesture into a sticky slap to Ava’s left cheek, just as Ilse’s and Ava’s eyes met. It struck Ava that her mother seemed both confused and just the faintest bit pained, a look that evoked a startlingly clear memory of the day three decades earlier when Ilse had appeared unannounced at the Bremen orphanage where Ava spent the war’s end. And for just an instant, Ava felt the same queasy emotional mix she had felt locking eyes with her mother for what had felt to her like the very first time: incandescent joy at Ilse’s long-awaited return. Heart-stabbing fear she’d walk right back out the door.

Instead, Ilse picked up her carry-on and strode over to where Ava and Sophie stood, walking her familiar shoulders-back soldierly walk. “Da bist du!” she said, as though she were the one who’d been waiting. “My God, I thought they’d never let us off.”

As she spoke she was looking not at Ava but at Sophie, who stared back with a look of round-eyed consternation that Ava fully understood: seeing them up close for the first time, the likeness between her mother and her daughter was not just confirmed but almost confounding. Not only were their eyes mirror images of one another in shape and in color, but their noses and chins matched as well. Even their expressions—sternly fascinated, slightly wary—looked as though they’d come off the same assembly line, albeit five decades apart.

“Isn’t she lovely!” Ilse was saying, with a warmth so genuine it caught Ava off-guard. “Will she come to me?”

Setting her bag down again, she held out her arms.

“She’s a little shy around…” Ava started. Then she stopped. Not just because she’d been about to say strangers, but because Sophie was actually lunging toward her grandmother, chubby arms outstretched. As though she’d been waiting for just this moment for the entirety of her short life.



* * *





“She isn’t walking yet?” her mother asked, as their taxi jerked onto the steaming expressway.

Ava wiped her brow with the bottom of her T-shirt. “The doctor says girls often start later. Especially if they don’t crawl first.”

“She doesn’t crawl?” Ilse sounded aghast, as though Ava had just revealed to her that her granddaughter didn’t breathe.

“I didn’t either, remember?”

“It was a long time ago,” her mother said vaguely.

Ava studied her sidelong. Though she hadn’t noticed it as much in the airport, Ilse had changed over the last decade. Her body seemed stockier, her posture slightly more stooped. She still had the smooth pale skin of a Bavarian milkmaid, but close up the lines above her eyebrows and bracketing her lips appeared more deeply etched. Her hair had changed too, ceding some of its gold to silver. Overall, the effect wasn’t so much aging as softening.

Indeed, her mother’s behavior seemed softer too; she laughed and babbled with her infant granddaughter with an unguarded silliness Ava had no recollection of having ever experienced herself. Then again (she reflected) her own grandparents had seemed entirely different beings with her than the staid, stern duo Ilse had curtly depicted on the few occasions she’d deigned to discuss them. For Ava, the years with her Oma and Opa had been the happiest and safest period of her childhood. Even thinking about them now brought a lump of loss to her throat.

She buried her nose in Sophie’s soft, sweat-damp hair. “Aren’t we happy Oma is here?” she murmured.

“NO,” said Sophie, and kicked her hard little heels into Ava’s thighs.

“Don’t hurt Mommy,” Ava chided, stilling the rogue ankles with one hand.

“Don’t you ever speak German to her?” Ilse pressed a handkerchief to her forehead.

“I don’t want to confuse her,” Ava lied. The truth was that she wanted as little connection to her old homeland as possible. She often didn’t even tell people she was German.

“Haven’t you read that early years are the best time to learn languages?” Ilse asked.

“I don’t have much time to read anything,” said Ava wearily. “This one takes up a lot of energy.”

“You took energy,” Ilse pointed out. “But I somehow managed to both work and read.”

You had help, Ava wanted to respond, though she did not.

“Well,” she said instead, carefully diplomatic. “Maybe you can give me a few tips. God knows I could use them.”

It was precisely the sort of opening that the Ilse Ava remembered would have used as a springboard for further disparagement. I can see that, she would have said. Or, You’ll need more than a few.

Now, though, she just smiled and touched one of the baby’s white-blond curls.

“You seem to be doing well enough,” she said.